The Industrial Five
SCHWARZ, JOHN E.
Yiddish Beyond Its Boundaries The Street By Israel Rabon Translated by Leonard Wolf Schocken. 192 pp. $14.95. Reviewed by Henryk Grynberg Polish novelist and poet living in the U.S. since...
...The main weakness of this effort was imitation, and Rabon was probably among the most eclectic Yiddish authors...
...It was used in numerous dailies and periodicals, secondary schools and theaters...
...If Rabon intended some of his imitations to be parodies of well-known themes, it is hard to distinguish the targets...
...Oneshould not look for prophecies of doom or holocaust in the gloomy situation of a homeless, hungry World War I veteran walking the streets of a European metropolis...
...since 1967 Although Israel Rabon (1900-42) wrol e in Y iddisli, The Street is not a "Jewish" story...
...The second passage, however, seems too close to the Baudelaire lines quoted by Rabon himself: "Praised art Thou, O Lord, who sends compassion /Into the hearts of horses, keeping them /From stepping on fallen drunkards in the street...
...Rabon did have a poetic imagination: "I walked the streets for several hours until it was gate-locking time...
...A 1928 reviewer s comment quoted on the jacket of The Street may be true: " 1 f you open the book, you have lo read it to the end—almost against your will.' But one can say the same about a lot of not necessarily first-rate literature...
...Moreover, Yiddish pronunciation and tradition alter some place-names, so onecan-not simply transcribe these words...
...The Street shows traces of Baudelaire and Rilke, whose poems Rabon translated, as well as Hamsun and Gorki...
...Many characters, including the main protagonist, are Jews in name only: They could easily have been members of some other ethnic or religious group...
...The helpless provincial confronting an overwhelming city has been asubject of continental literature at least since Balzac, and so has the problem of a demobilized soldier's difficult readjustment to civilian life...
...Contrary to Wolfs suggestion in his Afterword, I think the absence of structure in this book reveals more lack of skill than modernist "deformation...
...Out of about 40 Polish names and place-names, 33 are distorted...
...The translator has to identify them and restore them to a form readers will recognize...
...Who could guess that "Tshentso-khov" is the town of Czestochowa(with the well-known Polish holy shrine), or that "Lemberg" is Lvov and "Girardov" is Zyrardow...
...For despite a surrealistic and expressionistic pose, he attempts to remain detached, noncommittal, treating with cheap irony a revolution, a strike, even the War...
...They hoped to emancipate the language itself, to win for it citizenship among the European tongues...
...In Yiddish, all foreign names are spelled phonetically...
...Exuding the decadent mood oifin desiecle Europe, it is packed with surrealistic dreams and hallucinations, shaped by anarchistic rebellion against modern forms of life and morality, and frosted with expressionist antimilitarism and antibureaucratism...
...In part, the problem is his inconsistent tone...
...The book's Polish setting seems similarly arbitrary...
...It does not deal with Jewish fate, consciousness, culture, or religion...
...He walked the pages of his work almost as aimlessly as his narrator walks the streets, inconclusively revisiting the shoemaker, the woman with blue eyeglasses, thecircus wrestler...
...A state court in Plotsk [Plock] condemned Sniadev [s/d to the firing squad...
...The author of The Street possessed a sense of the grotesque and a talent for caricature, but he was "homeless" as a novelist...
...Neither the translator nor the editor has been very helpful, either...
...And they actually shot him...
...In the 180 pages of the book (translator Leonard Wolf calls it a "cluster of tales") the reader will also find trashy romance and a potboiler—the adventures of a circus wrestler...
...Rabon was apparently one of those 20th-century Jewish writers who tried to cross the boundaries you would expect to be defined by Yiddish...
...Sympathy for me, a human...
...I had been locked inside a street.'' And he was sensitive: "I would catch a compassionate glimpse in the eye of a passing horse...
...It seemed to me that / was being locked up in a lonely, foreign street...
...In one case a personal name is mistaken for a place name: "Michael Kvitshik [should be MichalKwicik] from the villageofShni-adev [Sniadow] stole 13,000marks from the villager Antoni Stshuparek [Szczu-parek...
...Shakespeare and Ibsen were played in Yiddish...
...Names of historical figures are misspelled, too—for example, "Josef" instead of Jozef Pilsudski...
Vol. 68 • September 1985 • No. 12
